Antoine Price, owner of Cafe Mimosa in San Clemente, talks with Caroline Cazaumayou and Sally Daniel on Monday night, when Price served a meal of foie gras in protest against California's new ban on the expanded duck or goose liver.

Antoine Price, owner of Cafe Mimosa, a French-style restaurant in San Clemente, created a special menu for a dinner Monday night to protest California's new ban on foie gras, or fatty duck or goose liver. The process of making foie gras causes a duck's liver to swell to many times its normal size and is considered cruel by animal-rights advocates.

Antoine Price, right, owner of Cafe Mimosa, chats with Allen Patrick and Anne Kelly at the San Clemente restaurant Monday night. Price created a menu featuring seven courses with foie gras as the centerpiece, in protest of a state ban on the delicacy.

A diner at Cafe Mimosa in San Clemente takes a bite of the amuse bouche, the opener of a seven-course meal served by the restaurant's owner, Antoine Price, to protest California's new ban on foie gras. The dish is made with beets, caviar and foie gras mousse.

Antoine Price served his "Foie You!" menu in protest of California's new ban on foie gras, a dish considered by many animal-rights advocates to be cruel to ducks and geese because their livers are expanded by overfeeding.

Antoine Price chats with diners at his Cafe Mimosa in San Clemente as he served a special meal to protest California's new ban on fatty duck or goose liver known as foie gras.

Vincent Price delivers plates of Frisee Lardon, made with poached quail egg, and terrine of foie gras at Cafe Mimosa in San Clemente on Monday night.

Antoine Price, owner of Cafe Mimosa in San Clemente, displays the Foie Club, the second course of a seven-course meal he served Monday night to protest California's new ban on the duck or goose liver delicacy.

This dessert, Barb-de-Papa, is foie gras wrapped in cotton candy on a stick. It was part of Antoine Price's foie gras party Monday night at Cafe Mimosa, his San Clemente restaurant.

Cafe Mimosa owner Antoine Price sports a tattoo reading "Foie gras 7-2" to commemorate Monday night's protest party at his restaurant. He is from France and is outspoken in his support of foie gras, a French delicacy that California banned from restaurants as of Sunday.

The day after California began banning the French delicacy foie gras in restaurants statewide, Antoine Price tossed a foie gras party Monday night at his San Clemente restaurant.

Price didn’t just include the banned dish in a gourmet $150 meal with wine that he offered his guests at Cafe Mimosa. He made foie gras – fatty liver from geese or duck – the centerpiece of all six dinner dishes. To top it off, it also was the dessert – foie gras wrapped in cotton candy on a stick.

In a not-so-subtle jab at the ban, Price titled the evening’s menu “Foie You!”

He said he isn’t concerned about a potential government response. “They can lock me up if they want,” Price said. “I don’t mind.”

It was all in good fun for diners who had discreetly signed on for the meal in what one might call a speakeasy atmosphere.

“There will always be foie gras to find,” said David Henninger of San Clemente. “It’s just going to be like Prohibition or anything else. Anything you make unavailable, people want more. The last place they tried to do it, in Chicago, the rule got overturned in six months.”

News reports from 2008 say it actually took two years for Chicago’s ban to be repealed.

“I’ll have it shipped in,” Sally Daniel of San Clemente said with a grin.

“Go to Arizona?” Kristine Robertson of San Clemente said when asked what she would do after Monday night.

She said she opposes foie gras because of “the tremendous amount of cruelty” that goes into raising the animals. Lard is shoved down their throats, she said. “They basically have liver disease.”

Locklear said Orange County People for Animals has had protests against foie gras and persuaded some restaurants to take it off their menus.

Caroline Cazaumayou of Laguna Hills, who was dining Monday night, challenged the contention that farms inhumanely force-feed geese and ducks to fatten their livers. “The ducks don’t have the same throat that we do,” she said. “I see how they feed the cattle here in America, the chickens with all the hormones and the antibiotics. Do you think that’s any better when they crowd them into pens, cutting their beak off so they don’t fight with each other?”

Price, a French-born U.S. citizen, said he came to know foie gras as a staple in France when he was a boy. His premise is that geese consume enough food to expand their liver to 10 times its normal size before embarking on a migration, and he figures someone must have killed one just before migration and found the huge fatty liver to be a culinary delight. It became a hit with diners.

“I believe it’s not inhumane,” Price said. “It happens in nature.”

Bryan Pease, co-founder and board chairman of the San Diego-based Animal Protection and Rescue League, said Tuesday that migrating geese expand their livers only 1½ times their normal size and that it’s only through force-feeding that livers get 10 times the normal size.

Charlotte Cressey of Laguna Niguel, an animal-rights advocate, said, “It’s completely different having a metal pipe forced down your throat a couple of times a day … than choosing to fatten up for wintertime and making that choice yourself.

“There is no such thing as humane meat,” Cressey said. “However, foie is one of the most cruel, egregious, torturous and unnecessary forms of violence inflicted on animals.”

Price said he purchased his foie gras legally from a reputable farm before the ban went into effect Sunday. “Can the state of California actually tell me to take my food and throw it away?” he said.

Cressey said humans don’t need to eat animals to survive. “I think we all can agree that it would benefit us to widen our circle of compassion by leaving animals off our plates,” she said.

Cindy Merrifield of San Clemente said she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong as she dined on foie gras Monday night. “You can eat it,” she said. “You just can’t sell it. But I guess we’re buying it!”

She was particularly tantalized by a dish that combined whipped foie gras with caviar and a beet. “It melts in your mouth!” she said. “It’s incredible. I’ve never even thought you would put something like this together.”

John Robertson, Kristine Robertson’s husband, said: “It’s just a really good food. I haven’t gotten into the politics part of it. I just want to eat some foie gras.”

Fred Swegles grew up in small-town San Clemente before the freeway. He has covered the town since 1970. Today he covers San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano. He was in the second graduating class at San Clemente High School, after having spent the first two years of high school in double sessions at historic Capistrano Union High School in San Juan. When the new high school opened, he became first sports editor of the school paper, The Triton. He studied journalism and Spanish at USC on scholarship, graduating with honors. Was sports editor of the Daily Trojan. Surfed on the USC surf team. (High school surfing didn't exist back then.) With the Sun Post, he began covering competitive surfing from the mid-1970s, with the birth of the the modern world tour and the origins of high school surf teams. He got into surf photography and into world travel. Has surfed on six continents (not Antarctica). Has visited 11 San Clementes. Has written photo-illustrated profiles on most of them, with more in the works.

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